1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to enterprise systems, and more specifically to simplifying provisioning of asynchronous interaction with enterprise suites having synchronous integration points.
2. Related Art
An enterprise suite refers to one or more applications that cohesively operate together to implement diverse functionalities required in an enterprise/organization. Each functionality represents a well-defined (in terms of required inputs and corresponding expected outputs, from a user perspective) high level function (e.g., create order and update invoice in inventory management, retrieve leads/contact and place voice call to a lead in customer relationship management, etc.) that is available to respective groups of users. Examples of such enterprise suites include Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 available from Oracle Corporation, SAP Business Suite available from SAP AG, etc.
Integration points are often provided by enterprise suites to facilitate external systems (e.g., client systems, third party applications, etc.) to access the corresponding functionalities. Integration points are referred to as such, since they are exposed (made accessible for invocation from external systems) with pre-specified identifiers (e.g., procedure names). External systems can accordingly access the corresponding functionality by invoking the integration points as per a pre-specified convention (e.g., an Application Procedure Interface (API) invocation).
Integration points often provide synchronous interaction, implying that an external system is required to wait for the response after invoking (or sending a request to) the integration point. Waiting implies that the execution flow (in the external system) typically stops at the invocation point until the corresponding response is received from the integration point.
In contrast, when accessing integration points that provide asynchronous interaction, the external system does not wait for the response. Rather, the response is delivered to the external system at a later time point after completion of processing of the request by the enterprise suite. Thus the execution flow in the external system can continue even after invocation of the integration point, without having to wait for the response. Integration points are accordingly viewed as synchronous and/or asynchronous, depending on the interaction they provide.
There is often a need to provision asynchronous interaction with enterprise suites having synchronous integration points. Such a task entails providing additional layer(s) between the integration points and the external systems, with such provided layer(s) interacting synchronously with the integration points, and interacting asynchronously with the external systems. It is generally desirable to simplify the provisioning of such layer(s).
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.